In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”

That’s from the New Yorker obituary for JD Salinger. Reading it, I had much the same reaction as Cat Valente, who said:

“Jim and the Ghost” from ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ (public domain image from Wikipedia).

“Really? Every reader? Every condition? Even though none of those books are about, by, or can manage to conceal for long their contempt for women, and the extent to which one is about non-whites is at best left wincingly unexamined? … The defining characteristic for writing about spoiled rich white people is that it WILL NEVER speak to every reader in every condition. And Huck Finn may have been poor on paper but he exhibits the snotty certainty of his own awesomeness and freedom to do whatever he likes without significant punishment that surely speaks to the spoiled rich white bro demographic.”


She wonders what the flaw was in Slaughterhouse Five or Little Women that Huckleberry Finn didn’t also contain.

And her comments coincide with a furore over a new edition of Huckleberry Finn in which the publishers have decided that Twain’s many hundreds of uses of ‘the N word’ are too hot to print in the modern market. So they’re taking them out, replacing it with ‘Slave’ and deleting all uses of the term ‘Injun’ as well.

Mixed reactions to this online; even quite liberal commenters find that seeing the N-word written down is Not Okay today (to the point that I’m not going to put it here because I don’t want to bring that to this site.) Others are outraged, such as Emma Caulfield (who played ‘Anya’ in Buffy), who says on her twitter:

“UNDERSTAND this. Mark Twain wrote HF to show the absurdity of racism. He was one of the most profound forward thinkers of any time.”

Language is important, and in the same way that we try to be deliberately inclusive in the feminist arena by rejecting language which is sexist, ableist or casually tolerant of any kind of bigotry, seeing prejudices treated as acceptable on a page can influence people. This isn’t the first time the work has been censored – CBS made a tv version in 1955 which cut out all mention of slavery and cast a white actor as Jim. Niiiice try, but no.

I’m with Emma on this though: if you’re too young to realise that Huck (or Tom Sawyer) parroting the local prejudices was done deliberately to reflect badly on the society they were in, and their poor and uneducated backgrounds, then the story itself should be enough to demonstrate the inhumanity of racism.

…which isn’t to say that Twain doesn’t also play unacceptably on stereotypes of coloured people in the book for what seems like cheap comedy value at times, because he certainly does.

I think there’s a bigger opportunity here. Those three books most assuredly don’t speak to “every reader and condition” – so let’s find some that do!

Your suggestions please, for books which spoke to you directly, which touched your heart, or which you think have genuine near-universal appeal. Let’s make a new top three: the authors can be any nationality, the books originally in any language. Answers in the comment thread, go!